Turkish airliner crashes at Amsterdam airport, 9 dead

By Harro ten Wolde

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Turkish Airlines passenger plane with 135 people aboard crashed in light fog while trying to land at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on Wednesday, killing nine, a local official said.

Haarlemmermeer acting Mayor Michel Bezuijen said 50 people were injured, 25 severely, when flight 1951 crashed at 10:31 local time (4:31 a.m. EST) short of a runway at Schiphol, Europe's fifth-largest by passenger volume.

The cause of the crash was still not clear, Bezuijen told reporters.

Dutch television showed what appeared to be covered bodies on the ground near the crashed single-aisle Boeing 737 jetliner.

The crumpled plane lay in three parts, with the tail section of the fuselage broken off, and a wide crack in the fuselage just behind the cockpit. The airliner had not caught fire.

"We are in the middle of a field now, approximately 5-6 km from the airport," Survivor Mustafa Bahcecioglu told Turkish broadcaster Channel 24.

"The majority of the passengers are injured but there are people who are not injured. Around 30 ambulances have come," he said.

Airport officials said the crashed aircraft was a Boeing 737-800, flight TK 1951 from Istanbul.

The plane, on a flight from Istanbul, broke up when it hit the ground north of a runway at Schiphol, which is 20 km (12 miles) southwest of Amsterdam's center.

At Schiphol airport, 10 flights were delayed and 10 were canceled, but otherwise operations were as usual.

Survivor Huseyin Sumer told CNN Turk by telephone: "The plane split into three parts. We are calling people to say the situation is not very serious but there might be casualties on the front side of the plane."

The crash appeared to be the worst since an El Al cargo plane crashed into high-rise apartment blocks in a southeastern suburb of Amsterdam in October 1992, killing 43 people, 39 of them on the ground.

The 1992 cargo plane was a Boeing 747. It plowed into the buildings, setting them on fire, shortly after takeoff after two engines had broken off.

(Writing by Reed Stevenson; Additional reporting by Niclas Mika, Gilbert Kreijger, Catherine Hornby in Amsterdam, Philip Blenkinsop, Paul de Bendern in Istanbul and Ibon Villelabeitia in Ankara; Editing by Giles Elgood)